


Sleeping Sickness

by awesomocity



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Gen, adventures of a doomed dave, basically everyone dies, cremation, that sort of thing, trigger warning for graphic depictions of mortuary work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 06:45:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awesomocity/pseuds/awesomocity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Dave Strider, and it takes you a while to settle back into this timeline when your eyes open. Two minutes ago you were wearing a sharp red suit, fighting mutant clown creatures that bled ink, and thirteen years old. When you wake up you are in boxers and an undershirt damp with sweat, tangled in the fine sheets on your king-sized bed, and thirty-four years old.</p><p>You have the depressing notion that this is the worse of the two scenarios.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Sickness

**Author's Note:**

> I guess Karkat’s death crawled up into my brain and nested, even though I knew he’d be back on his feet within a few updates. Add in a few bad dreams, a special on the nature of the universe(s?) and let simmer, I got this. Mood music and titular song – “Sleeping Sickness” by City and Color.

Your name is Dave Strider, and it takes you a while to settle back into this timeline when your eyes open. Two minutes ago you were wearing a sharp red suit, fighting mutant clown creatures that bled ink, and thirteen years old. When you wake up you are in boxers and an undershirt damp with sweat, tangled in sheets on your king-sized bed, and thirty-four years old.

You have the depressing notion that this is the worse of the two scenarios.

The sky through your window is the weak brew of blue and gray that comes when too-late-to-be-mature gets tagged out by too-mature-rises-early. Birds start warming up for the thankless day of work ahead. You could roll over and try to get another hour of sleep before you have to get around, but you’re awake now and not sure if you want to sink back into the middle of what you’d been dreaming. Besides, there’s a feathery asshole right outside cawing to raise the dead.

“Better not,” you croak, rubbing sand out of your eyes and stretching from your toes. “Last thing I need is a bunch of customers lined up for refunds.”

You get out of bed and go through the motions of getting ready for the day. Piss, shower, shave. Stare into the mirror as you pop in dark brown contact lenses to cover the red of your irises. The shades you wore when you were younger are somewhere in a drawer, put aside when you first went into business. You open a wardrobe which is wall-to-wall black suits and pick one at random. Looking appropriately professional, you take coffee for breakfast before heading out to your car.

On the way to work you spot a huge dead dog in the street. You pull over to the curb, get a shovel and a heavy-duty trash bag from the trunk, and go to peel it off the road. This is sort of your unspoken job. Your neighbors could do it, but you’re the least bothered by it. It isn’t a hardship for you to clean up the remains so their kids don’t come out to play to a rotting corpse.

Before you tie the bag up you check the dog’s neck for a collar. Its white fur is dirty, matted and saturated with blood, so the search is gruesome and unpleasantly sticky. You hardly blink. There’s no collar, no tags. You suppose it could be microchipped and have slipped the rest on some adventure, but the state of its coat doesn’t speak to loving care.

You’re gripped by the worst deja-vu, so intense it nearly makes you sick. Something about this situation is seriously fucked up— beyond the obvious and unnatural twist of the huge white dog’s spine, which brings up nasty memories under the plastic of the bag. You wish now you hadn’t stopped. You feel like you’re much younger suddenly, looking at death for the first time and shaking all over. You stand with your hands braced on the closed trunk and wait for the feeling to pass. It doesn’t take long.

You get to work and flip the sign on your door from CLOSED to OPEN. Crate the dog’s corpse up for cremation and send it on its way. Then you hang up your suit jacket and tie, scrub your hands clean, and descend into the dim coolness of the prep room.

The first customer of Strider’s Mortuary Services has been waiting on you overnight. Elderly man dropped by a coronary. He’ll be pretty straightforward. It’s the occupant of the second refrigerated drawer that’ll be the day’s real work. Accidental victim of a drive-by, an open-and-shut case as far as the body went. It was picked up from the coroner in basically the same condition it’d been delivered in, which wasn’t great.

You pull on your smock, your face mask, your gloves. You go to work.

By the time a late lunch starts nagging on your attention, Mr. Coronary’s basically ready to go. Cleaned up and made up, he’s at the place where some family members will whisper a watery, “He might just be sleeping”. A job well done. You groan and crack your neck, the first sounds you’ve heard for a while outside the soft noises made in the course of your work. You try not to speak aloud when you’re in the lab. Your mouth has a life of its own, and it’s illegal for you to curse around the stiffs.

You’ve still got the drive-by girl to go, and your receptionist caught you getting a cup of coffee upstairs earlier and told you there’s a delivery coming. Victims of a car accident just released to your care. Oh joy, oh rapture. You think of staying in to eat, reconsider when you check your watch and remember who else might need to be dragged away after working since before God was up.

The emergency room at Saint Jude’s is blessedly calm when you get there. Three people are in chairs waiting for staff—a boy, his mother, and a bum in a huge purple hoodie. The boy is cradling his arm, teary-eyed, and looks at you as you come in like the break is your fault. His mother pales, and you think putting on your tie and jacket before leaving the funeral home might’ve been a miscalculation. You must look like death in the flesh, and you don’t get out enough to be used to it. You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from humming “Don’t Fear the Reaper”.

You wave at the woman behind the main desk, who waves back and gestures to the left. You nod your thanks and navigate the sterile halls and lobbies until you find yourself near the glass-paneled ICU. You study the occupied beds through the windows, where each person in worse repair than the last.

“Visiting future clients?” a voice behind you gripes, and you crack a smile.

“I do that every time I step out of the house,” you say. “I’m here to see you.”

Karkat Vantas sighs like your very existence is a serious nuisance and crumples against the wall behind you. His scrubs are wrinkled and the skin under his eyes is bruised with lack of sleep. “What, am I not going to die?”

“I fully expect you to chug along for a few centuries on righteous fury and multivitamins alone,” you reply. “Death’ll come for you and get shouted down, end up high-tailing it out of your shitty apartment like the power of Christ compelled him.”

He snorts. “I’ve got a few minutes. Cafeteria?”

“Works for me,” you say with a shrug, hands deep in the pockets of your slacks. You follow him back the way you came, making pit stops for him to check on patients left on their own for a while. He frowns over charts, hands out candy from a wealth of pockets, and gripes at the other nurses. He is an unstoppable juggernaut of sullen compassion and untreated anger issues. That never changes, no matter the situation you dream of him in.

Then you’re remembering the dreams he’s starred in, and the disconnect between the tan, dark-haired man in front of you and the gray, nubby-horned child in your mind’s eye is so pronounced you feel a headache coming on. You try to shake it off, but you’re having a hard time with that today.

“You’re too quiet, Strider,” Karkat comments, catching you off-guard. “You don’t suffer from acute verbal diarrhea like you used to, but a surgeon two hallways back got his feet tangled in an IV stand and did a solid thirty seconds of drunken hospital mambo and you had nothing to say. Nothing.”

“I’ve developed a profound understanding of the hardships all human beings face in the course of our lives,” you say, laying a hand over your heart and lifting your eyes to the ceiling. “Let he who has never snorted beer out his nose or walked into a door cast the first stone, etcetera, etcetera.”

“What a fucking inspiration,” he replies. “Also, what a steaming mire of utter horseshit. The day you stop narrating pratfalls is the day I forsake Will Smith and gustily urinate on my Blu-ray shelf. Seeing as this morning it reeked only of absolute cinematic brilliance, I choose to believe something has rerouted your train of thought away from moronic commentary. Anything that can do that is a national goddamn emergency. What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” you say. “Seriously. I’ve just got a long day ahead of me.”

He’s obviously not satisfied with that answer, but you can see the moment he lets it go. His fingers uncurl, bitten nails peeking out as the urge to clench his hands into fists is relaxed. “Whatever, you entire garage of tools. I’ll find out about it eventually. Everything comes around to bite me eventually.”

As you head out of the ER lobby he catches sight of the bum in the hoodie and you have to pause again. Karkat goes over, yanks the hood back, and you just catch a glimpse of matted hair, glazed eyes and face paint before he lets loose another all-mighty sigh and drags the man—who unfolds to at least a foot taller than him—to the woman at the desk and has a quick word with her. She rolls her eyes but eventually agrees with whatever he’s saying, calls out another nurse, and the man is bundled in for treatment.

“Is that the guy you’ve been playing rehab counselor for?” you ask as he joins you again. Karkat scrubs a hand over his face.

“Don’t fucking start, okay? I’ve been on for eighteen hours with piss breaks, I don’t need you preaching the same bullshit sermon as everyone else in this cesspit,” he says, infinitely tired. “I know I shouldn’t be so nice to him. I get that. I just.”

He cuts himself off and looks at you in the most angry, helpless way you have ever been looked at. Like he’s lost the word he was trying to say, needs you to prompt him, and doesn’t want to ask. You let the moment stretch until his clicking throat comes up with:

“I feel like I’m the only one who can help him.”

There’s probably something you should say to disabuse him of that notion. Whatever it is, it doesn’t come to you. You just nod and keep walking, trying to ignore the heaviness in your stomach. You have a bland lunch with him in the hospital cafeteria and shoot the shit. Talk about his patients and reminisce about college. During a rant about a girl with suspicious bruising and a twitchy boyfriend, you wonder if he ever learned to separate. Compartmentalize. If he goes home whenever the hospital’s legally bound to let him go and takes off the job when he takes off the scrubs. From the way he’s talking between aggressive mouthfuls of salad, you don’t think so.

As you go your separate ways, your mind inexplicably keeps going back to the dead dog this morning. You feel like you should turn around and grab him and say something that’ll make him walk out of the hospital, away from his never-ending crusade against all that’s wrong in the world. But the words still aren’t coming to you. Karkat charges back through the yawning automatic doors of the ER undeterred.

Your afternoon devolves into chemicals and reconstructive work after that as you put the drive-by girl to rights. The coroner left the trademark y-incision, took the actual slugs, but the rest of the work with the bullet holes is left to you. You pack and suture the entry wounds, spend more time on the gaping exit wounds. You watch as embalming fluid diffuses through her body and reshapes features drawn by death. You keep an eye on the wounds you closed up, seal the new incision needed for the embalming at her brachial artery. Drain the blood and organs, saturate them with chemicals so they don’t reek. Pack the nose and throat with cotton, stitch the mouth closed from the inside. Dry the eyes, pop in the plastic caps that keep them the right shape, make sure they stay closed. It’s almost second-nature by now, but you’re still meticulous. You get her makeup as close to natural as you can, working from a photograph the family provided against the paleness of death. The dyed embalming fluid can only do so much of your job for you. She’s dressed, has her hair fixed, and is placed in her casket by your assistants.

You’re glad the family of the car accident victims just wants them cremated. No embalming, no viewing. You think that’s better anyway. That’s what you did for Dirk. The end is the end, no parading around.

You go home at the end of the day and eat dinner in the living room under the watchful gleam of his stainless steel urn. You scrub your hands down twice before you take out your contacts to sleep.

When you dream it’s mostly of a computer screen. You’re talking to someone, some strange fucker who types in purple and alternating caps, rambles about rap and miracles. You send him a link. You think you’re making a joke, but all you can feel is despair. It tinges every aspect of the dream, and you wake early again the next morning like you’re trying to run away from it. You call Karkat and get his voicemail, but don’t leave a message. As the day wears on, you forget why it was so important to get a hold of him.

Your days pass this way for a while. The funeral home receives bodies and you prepare them for viewing or hold them for cremation. You usually stay downstairs, where it’s cool and quiet, plying your trade. But when your receptionist is off and your assistants are scarce, you have to go operate the other end. You guide grieving widows through your casket showroom, show a young man who could’ve been your mirror image a selection of urns for his lost sibling. You sell them goods and services that aren’t necessary and most can’t afford. You’re not bad at it. A little distant. A little cold. You conduct the viewing of the drive-by girl and the crowd is dense. You let your receptionist pat backs and offer quiet words of support.

You eat in the supply closet more often than not, closing off and preparing yourself. Christmas is just around the corner and that means business is about to pick up. Old people who’ve hung on for their families will let go. Disputes will come to a head, sometimes violently. People will stumble out of parties sure they’re good to drive. It happens every year. You may have to hire on temporary staff.

This time of year most of your weird dreams, the ones where you’re _you_ and they’re _them_ no matter what you all look like, resolve themselves into a pile of bizarre junk on a round platform. You’re making it, you can make anything you want, and it’s liberating for all that you seem to be using it poorly.

The good ones, anyway. The bad dreams are all gunshots and bloody snow, ruled by a menacing black shadow and mind-numbing pain.

You keep waking up cold and out-of-place. You keep looking at yourself in the mirror like you’re a stranger. How did you get so old? But of course you know, you remember the intervening years from thirteen to thirty. You remember every birthday past sixteen with absolute clarity.

How weird they felt.

One day it snows, thick and white, and you decide to test your all-weather tires and get lunch across town. You duck into a restaurant you’ve never been to before, grateful their holiday decorations are tasteful. The walls are dark and the rafters are hung with white icicle lights, reflecting off the crystal glasses and clear glass sculptures of snowmen to cast splinters of brilliance through the low-lighting. It’s very subtly non-denominational, and a relief after the glaring cheer of your neighbors.

You’ve barely started on your appetizer when a girl who is the antithesis of subtle plunks down into the chair opposite and eats one of your crab cakes.

“You look familiar,” she says as she munches, studying you through the circular frames of her glasses. Your fork is just kind of hanging in the air while you gape at her like a complete moron. She shakes her head, a messy bun of hair at the nape of her neck wobbling, and adds, “Strike that, I know exactly who you are. Dave.”

“Did someone die?” you say. Smooth. You meant to suggest she might have known you from your work. Instead she frowns, comically sincere, and steals another crab cake.

“Pretty much everyone,” she replies, and pops it in her mouth. “But I should’ve known you and me, we’d still be here.”

She holds up her right hand, crosses the index and middle finger, and shakes them emphatically. “Time and space. We’re like _that_ , no matter what. Holding down the stand, making the last fort.”

“Nailed it, Harley,” you reply. The name is just there, waiting for you to use it. You don’t have to ask if you know her, because you know that you do. Sometimes she’s very young. Sometimes she’s very old, and her long hair is as colorless as the snow outside. Sometimes her skin’s grey and her nails are yellow, instead of painted fire engine red with a coat of glitter. Sometimes she’s a he. But she’s always Jade Harley, and now she’s here. Like Karkat was just there at freshman orientation and you started bickering like you’d know each other for years.

You should be questioning your sanity. This is someone literally out of your dreams, your worst nightmares, and you’re both acting like you’ve known each other all along. You think it should at least be kind of awkward. But you’ve switched gears like this meeting was penned into your appointment book, between viewings and cremations, like you’ve been waiting all this time. Like there’s not much time left. Jade grins beatifically, teeth perfectly straight, and you order lunch for her.

You compare notes. You became an undertaker and she plays bass in a mildly successful indie outfit out of Waikiki. They’re on tour. You laugh about it, because somewhere there are versions of yourselves that would laugh about it. She asks about your eyes. You ask about her teeth. You talk about work some more. She tells you about her Grandpa and you tell her about Bro. You call them by the names you know them by in every other instance, their true names. Jake died in a freak hunting accident, though she confesses she doesn’t know whether the accident was strange or the quarry. You agree Dirk was probably choosing discretion over valor by not cutting the semi-truck in half when it got close enough to hit him.

You don’t talk about anyone else until the very end. You retrieve your napkin from your lap, wipe your mouth and lean back in your chair, probably the most comfortable you’ve ever been. She smiles again, this time with no teeth, and is perfectly silhouetted against the inky darkness of the restaurant wall, flecked with light. Powerful deja-vu hits you again, more comforting than startling. You wonder if you should mention the dog that was probably Becquerel, or offer her the little urn you’ve been saving. But you’re trying not to darken the mood.

“I should really see if Karkat’s free while you’re in town,” you say. “Have to find somewhere else to eat, though. It’s gonna be wall to wall cursing cranked up to eleven.”

Her smile folds like a bad hand of cards. “Karkat’s alive?”

“Yeah,” you say, confused. “We went to school together. There’s a fine line between a nurse and a mortician, mostly involving how much shit you have to deal with.”

She doesn’t laugh at the joke. She just seems to become infinitely sadder. “Are you sure?”

“Sure of what?”

“That he’s alive.”

“I had lunch with him a few weeks ago,” you say, but you’re getting less firm by the second. “Corpses, not really known for that much vitriol towards hospital administration.”

“Oh, Dave,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

You find your feet like you had to dig in the hall closet for them, and almost knock over the restaurant owner on your way out. You wipe out on the icy sidewalk, but pick yourself up and keep running. Your receptionist looks worried when you come in, all _didn’t you have a friend who was a nurse at the hospital?_

If you hadn’t heard it from Jade you would’ve found out from the evening news. Nurses at Saint Jude’s Hospital were brutally stabbed by a homeless man they were attempting to treat for drug abuse. Gamzee Makara, age twenty-six, had been in isolation to let the drugs work their way out of his system, and when they had he went berserk. He slit his own wrists after fatally wounding four hospital staff and injuring two others. The switchblade had been in his sock.

Karkat Vantas didn’t walk away with injuries. He also didn’t have any family.

You call the coroner, curse a blue streak at her, call the competing funeral home they released him to and curse a blue streak at them. You take the van yourself, sign the necessary paperwork. You don’t watch as he’s loaded. Your beleaguered receptionist unloads him as you prep the morgue.

He’s so much smaller on the table. You’re already visualizing the stitches you’ll need to put his now grayish tanned skin to rights, to lovingly seal up the gaping mouths the druggie sliced in his torso like he’s a favorite doll who might be as good as new with a few patches and a shine to his dull eyes.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” you can imagine him saying. “Here is my malnourished corpse.”

You’re crying. You don’t know when you started. You didn’t cry when you pulled your brother out of the refrigerated compartment. You didn’t cry any of the times children lay before you on this table, or brutalized young women, or any of the other sad, empty bodies you’ve faced down. Everyone would say that they shouldn’t have died, and while you’d nod along you’d inwardly disagree. Everything was supposed to die. Time was finite. You learned that when you were eight and preserved your first centipede. When you were twenty-nine and your only family got mowed down by a semi. Life lost its meaning without death. But Karkat Vantas wasn’t supposed to die.

You end up on the floor curled against the table, bawling like a child, and you know. In that moment, you just know.

This isn’t the right timeline.

You went through thirty-four years, studied, worked, without purpose. Karkat wasted away trying to treat the world’s ills in a rolling horrorshow of an ER, without purpose. Gamzee fucking Makara melted his brain with drugs and died covered in more of others’ blood than his own, without purpose. Everyone else you knew in one way or another died without meaning because this timeline is some sort of trial, and it failed. It’s a dead end, and all that’s left is closing the books on the participants.

You get up because you have to get up. You face down Karkat’s body, shrunken by murder and the final release of all his pointless fury. You consider what to do, because for the second time in your life this is your call. Most people you work with want their loved ones embalmed and displayed, as if doing so will let them hold on just a little longer. With Dirk, you’d been in a hurry just to stop comparing the motionlessness of his face when he was trying for it and when he didn’t have to anymore. To stop staring at how twisted the shape below the neck in the body bag seemed to be. No embalming, straight into the cremation chamber. With Karkat you split the difference.

Painful care goes into his restoration. It’s as if, with every step, you’re bringing him closer to life. Stitch the knife wounds closed to match the y-incision the coroner left— _just making sure he really_ was _ventilated by some Juggalo going through withdrawals, standard procedure, you know_ —and wash the body. The colored embalming fluid and the cotton, the half-moon eye replacements and the hidden stitches behind his lips. Never shall this mouth open again to rage, ye and verily. The makeup, to take the edge off the waxiness of his restored cheeks. You actually darken the skin under his eyes, because the ever-present bags are gone and he just looks wrong without them. Draining the blood will do that to bruises.

He only owns one suit. You find this out when his landlord lets you into his apartment and extracts a promise from you to clean it out. He owns approximately five thousand sets of scrubs. You pick out the nicest set that isn’t ridiculous for the enjoyment of child patients, and you dress him yourself back at the funeral home. When all is said and done, he might as well have conked out in the ready room at Saint Jude’s for a fifteen minute powernap.

You start crying again, and scrub your hands down so you can take out your contacts before they’re flooded out.

You don’t want to wait to order one, so you find the nicest casket that will fit him in the showroom and take it. It’s your goddamn funeral home. Your assistants are dubious about the whole thing, but you have him set him up in one of the viewing rooms and you take a goddamn minute too. You still don’t have any words, so you don’t say them. He didn’t believe in anything more constructive and patently ridiculous than the buried potential in humanity. He didn’t have any family to request a funeral, and he never made any friends with his attitude. Other than you.

You watch his casket slide into the cremation chamber with red eyes, and send everyone else home. You can do the rest yourself. When the phone rings you hang it up and set the receiver off the hook. For a little under two hours you wait, until you look through the little peep hole into the furnace chamber and see only glowing ashes. You rake them out to be cooled, sort the coffin nails from the charred bones, and put them through the machine that breaks everything down to dust and deposits the whole finely ground mix into a little plastic urn with Karkat’s name on it.

You steal him a better one from your display models again. The best one, this time. Human beings only condense to so much ash, even people who seemed so huge when they were stomping around healing others.

When you go to bed that night, you dream of him. Of three years of enforced companionship instead of over a decade of on-and-of, we’ll-hang-when-you’re-free friendship. You start off fighting with him, riling him up just because, and that’s not so different than what happened in this timeline. But as most things with that timeline, that strange world where he’s grey and nubby-horned instead of amber-eyed and so much older, things get better.

You wake up so simultaneously happy from the dreams and sad from the reality of your life that you throw up. It’s as good an excuse as any to take a day. Once you’ve called in to work, that day stretches ahead of you like an interminable wasteland. Karkat is dead. You didn’t get Jade’s information, though you could probably look her up. Dirk’s been dead for years. It dawns on you that you don’t have other friends either, and you wonder why that didn’t strike you as strange before this moment. Probably because you did have friends. Just not this time.

You know what you want to do.

You look them up. Everyone. Every single person you can remember from your dreams, the repetitive cast of faces that appear no matter the circumstances—young or old, male or female, human or otherwise. You find them, and you start running off their obituaries. At the end of the day your bedroom wall is covered with paper.

You start with Rose, who committed suicide at thirteen. You would have liked to see that note. It was probably an entire journal with footnotes.

Roxy’s obit is attached. A little over five days after Rose was buried, she ate the end of a rifle herself.

Dirk’s you know by heart, because you wrote it. Took a giant fucking truck to every conceivable vital organ except the one he cared about most, his brain. Died of the clichéd indignity. You’ll need to write Karkat’s obituary copy too, now that you think about it.

Jake’s turns up. Jade didn’t write it, probably because she was too young. It describes something about an unexpected lava flow and a cryptid he’d been chasing. Freak accident was accurate either way.

Jane died from an explosion in her home, caused by a gas leak from her stove. You know there’s a joke in there somewhere, but you’re not the person to find it.

John died in the cradle. He rolled over in his sleep onto a soft blanket and suffocated. You choke out something between a laugh and a sob. His dad slit his wrists with a shaving razor after finding him.

Gamzee’s has yet to be written, but you print an article about the incident at the hospital and pin it up for him and Karkat both.

You sort through the trolls in quick succession, the whole exercise becoming unbearable as the printer sheets pile up. Kanaya was the victim of a robbery-gone-wrong. Might have made it if she didn’t bleed out at the scene. Nepeta was beaten to death by a rival over her expensive collection of Victorian teapots, and Equius was crushed to death at a construction site. Sollux died at his computer, put down in the middle of coding a nasty virus by a sudden brain aneurysm. Terezi was born blind, and without her ridiculous smell-o-vision she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck at the age of eight. You had at least hoped she got to be a cop and went down in the line of duty. Took some thugs with her.

You take a break to find the bottle of vodka Karkat gave you for your thirtieth birthday and pour yourself a generous amount.

Eridan drowned Feferi by accident as a child and committed suicide himself a few years later. Aradia was pushed in front of a subway train. Vriska died in a bar fight on spring break in Tijuana. Tavros went cliff-diving with friends and misjudged the location of the rocks. In the end you even look up SBURB, trying to find that game that should have changed your life. Surprisingly, it exists. It was an actual video game, much less hyped than the hellish creation that the other version of you fought and died in. You download a copy for PC and play it, heedlessly. It’s like a shittier version of The Sims. You laugh until you cry.

They’re all gone, all different ways and times and places. All except you and Jade Harley.

You find out that the call at the mortuary was her, and belatedly realize that there was one person who might’ve liked a funeral for Karkat. You drink another couple shots of your birthday vodka, and find a voicemail from her on your cell phone.

“ _You’ve been dreaming about it, right?”_ her voice asks, tinny through the speakerphone. You’re lying on your bed with Karkat’s ashes on your left, cell phone to your right on the duvet. The unbelievably valuable sword you inherited from your brother hangs on the wall above you, facing the wall covered in obituary printouts. “ _God, this would all be so much easier if you didn’t dream about it.”_

You raise your glass in recognition of that undeniable fucking truth.

“ _I can only guess you do because I do too,”_ Jade continues on the recording. “ _I don’t think anyone else did, though. I don’t know why. You know I met Sollux once? I asked him if he remembered me, and he suggested an excellent therapist. Besides, I think if they’d remembered they’d have all tried to find each other. Us too.”_

There’s a pause, like she’s gathering her thoughts. You stare at the faces on some of the printouts.

“ _We’re different, I think. Too woven into things. It’s hard to explain, and I’m not so big on science as I used to be. As I might have been. But there’s this theory out there, that universes, multiple—maybe even alternate—universes can touch. Something about branes—B-R-A-N-E-S—that they can touch, maybe influence each other in some way._

“ _If there were lives to be touched by that kind of thing, by the movements of universes, Dave, I think it had to be ours. Time and space. Together, like that. And I’m sorry. Because you and I know what’s coming because of it. Or enough.”_

She pauses again, to laugh.

“ _We’ll be fine, though, won’t we, Dave? Somewhere out there we’re winning. And I think we’re good to wrap things up here. I’ll be the bang we go out with! You be the undertaker. See you around.”_

The electronic voice from your cell phone starts to tell you about the next message, but you jam your finger down on the number nine and then hang up. You finish your vodka and glance at the sword above you, the wall before you, the remains next to you. You fall asleep like that.

You dream you are sixteen and things are happening very fast. You’re seeing people you haven’t seen for a very long time and losing track of friends you’ve been close to for years.

When you open your eyes it’s another blue-gray dawn. Somehow, in spite of everything, the world has kept turning. You get up, put in your contacts, and put on your suit. When you come in your receptionist tells you what you missed. Among the items is a funeral arrangement made ahead of time. A Miss Jade Harley established Strider’s Mortuary Services as the destination for her remains upon the occasion of her death. She wanted to be cremated. And she’d paid ahead of time, in full.

You take your lunch outside and eat in the snow. The cold tells you this is real, and you have work to do.

You make no attempt to speak with Jade again. You’ve never been the kind of person to endure the dying part. You prefer to deal with the dead. In the meantime you order in another of your nicest urns. You wait for the universe to make the second to last stitch on this weeping gash of a timeline. You will take care of her, whether stricken by illness, killed in a stage dive, or dismembered by faceless psycho. You’ll make her whole again, like you did Karkat, and you’ll give her to the flames. Because that’s your job this time around. You’re not a knight defending, you’re a pallbearer delivering. And then you’ll take care of yourself.

At night your dreams are more nebulous and distorted. Things seem off that you hope will be righted. There are battles to fight that seem impossible. Amidst the chaos and the baseline of terror and uncertainty that version of you always comes back to, against a host of unimaginably powerful creatures, you silently try to reach him. Because if branes touch they touch, and a door opens both ways. You try to let him know that despite all of it—he’s so very lucky.

You close your eyes at night, trace his path through his uncertain but wide-open future like a line on your palm.

You are Dave Strider, and you wait to die.


End file.
